Openai has acquired ROI, an AI-powered personal finance app. In line with recent trends in the AI industry, only CEOs are jumping.
Chief Executive and co-founder Sujis Vishwajis announced the acquisition on Friday, and sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that he was only one of the four ROI staff members who joined Openai. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. The company will end its operation on October 15th and will end service to its customers.
The ROI deal marks the latest in this year's Openai's series of acquirers, including Context.ai, Crossing Minds and Alex.
It is not clear whether ROI's technology will move to Openai or which unit Vishwajith will join, but it clearly matches Openai's bet on personalization and life management as the next layer of AI products. ROI brings a specialized team that has tried to solve financial personalization at scale. This is an assignment that allows the lesson to be applied more widely.
New York-based ROI was founded in 2022 and raised $3.6 million in early stage funding from investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Spark Capital, Gradient Ventures and Spacecadet Ventures. Its mission was to aggregate the financial footprint of users, including stocks, crypto, defi, real estate, and NFTs into one app that could track funds, provide insights and help people make transactions.
“I started ROI three years ago and made investments accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience,” Vishwajis wrote in X's post.
Beyond transaction tracking, ROI gave users access to financially savvy AI companions who responded in ways that made sense to them. When signing up, users can personalize their ROI by providing information such as what they are doing for their livelihood and how they wished to respond to the ROI.
In the example where ROI posted to X, the sample user wrote: In response to a question about the status of a user's portfolio, Roi responded:
